Changes to Twitter’s character count limit

What makes Twitter unique as a social platform is it’s 140 character limit for tweets.

But in future months you’ll be able to squeeze even more content and text in to the 140 characters you can use per tweet.

How? In a recent blog post, Twitter outlined changes they are making to what counts as a character in a Tweet.

When replying to a tweet, Twitter handles won’t count in the character limit (Perfect for when replying to users with a long username!)

The URL for media such as images, videos, polls, quote tweets won’t count towards the total count

This means that you’ll have more characters to use per tweet, and might save you from that frustrating moment where you’re looking for any abbreviations or unnecessary words you can find to get under the character limit.

Another big change is how tweets starting with @ work. Previously if you tweet @bob, your tweet will go to ONLY people who follow you AND follow Bob. To get around this, a popular hack has been to include a full stop in front of the username, which ensures that the tweet goes out to all your followers. This will no longer be necessary, with these tweets always going out to your followers, regardless of who else they follow.

These updates will take effect in the coming months, and Twitter even promises they have even more coming in the future to help us get more from our tweets.